Among the monolithic malls I’ve ever seen, Festival Supermall has the best shape or building footprint, in my opinion. As you can see from the satellite image of the mall, its unusual shape is a far cry from the boring, blocky exteriors of most SM Supermalls. Festival’s sprawling shape is such that I mistakenly thought many years ago that it was bigger than SM Megamall. (Festival has 20 hectares of floor area while Megamall has 33.1.)

Festival Supermall opened back in May 1998 (happy 10th year anniversary!) and, as far as I know, is the only mall operated by Filinvest Development Corporation under their Filinvest Alabang subsidiary. The mall appears to be their flagship leasable real estate in their flagship territory of Filinvest Corporate City in Alabang, Muntinlupa. I think that Festival is a mid-end mall, catering to the middle class while Ayala Land’s Alabang Town Center to the west is for the upper class and Star Mall’s Metropolis Mall is for the lower-middle class. Well, that’s just my perception.

Aside from the requisite supermarket, department store, and cinemas (Festival has 10 of them), the other major anchor areas of Festival Supermall are Pixie Forest, Gameworx, and X-Site. Pixie Forest is a vast children’s playground; Gameworx is a gaming area containing arcade games, billiards tables, bowling lanes, and a small indoor inline-skating hockey ring; and X-Site is a mini amusement park containing one of two roller coaster rides inside a mall that I’m aware of (the other is in Storyland of SM Southmall). Also worth checking out is the kiddie train ride at the ground floor of the mall.

If you want to learn more, you should go to the official website. (You can turn off the website’s irritating music by clicking on the “music off” button at the upper right corner.)